Sound Transit trumpets year-over-year
growth to put the best possible spin on the long-run failure to achieve the forecast
used to justify its expenditure and taxation levels to voters and the U.S.
Government. For example, total ridership on Central Link in
2014 -- including weekend ridership to football, soccer, and baseball games --
was up 13% over 2013.

The first quarter of 2015 total ridership was
up 5% over the same period in 2014, affected by required service closures to get
ready for system expansion in 2016.

This
updated page covers Seattle's light rail daily passenger counts from the first day of
revenue service July 20, 2009 through March 31, 2015. Sound Transit
has provided PITF with the data presented here, all of which are estimates
subject to change.Archive of data
sheets from Sound Transit is at the bottom of this page.

Sound Transit Central Link light
rail ridership in its present configuration is gradually reaching what the agency
calls "maturity." Along with Sound Transit leaders and
staff, PITF agrees with Sound Transit that 2015 will be another
growth year for Seattle light rail ridership, especially if the three
professional teams at the regional sports stadiums just south of downtown
Seattle draw lots of fans. Sound
Transit is forecasting in budget documents that 2015 all-year light rail
ridership at 35,300 average per weekday will be seven percent over 2014, which should be easily achieved,
even though the 2015 first quarter growth rate was below this pace.

Little noted by Seattle rail fans has been
the been the ongoing failure of the agency to yet reach its light rail ridership forecast for 2011
even as economic recovery continues. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) was told by
Sound Transit in 2003 -- as part of the justification for the $500 million Full
Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) -- that by fall 2011 the average weekday
light rail ridership would reach 37,800, and annual ridership would be at
11.5 million. As noted in Table 5.1 of the FTA-required Sound
Transit Before and After Study,
in 2011 Central Link carried 7.8 million passengers compared to
the FFGA prediction of 11.5 million, about 32% lower than predicted. Not until the summer of 2013 did the weekday ridership
on a few of the busiest days ever hit 37,800, and not until August 2014 did
the weekday
average for an entire month go above the 2011 goal. The average weekday
ridership for all of 2014 reached 33,054, well below the goal once hoped to
be met three years before that.

To be sure, the Sound Transit and the Federal Transit Administration have
provided many reasons why light rail ridership in Seattle is lagging the
forecasts used to justify the expenditure of public resources to build it,
beyond The Great Recession as the primary alibi. The other factors include
higher fares than planned, and headways that were implemented at less attractive levels than
forecast. This excuse from Sound Transit is intriguing:

"Slow Adoption of New Transit Service in Rainier Valley Corridor. Major
transit-dependent populations in the Rainier Valley have not yet fully
adopted Link as a transit option. Outreach efforts have shown reluctance by
many low income and non-English speaking populations in the Beacon Hill and
Rainier Valley neighborhoods to change long-established travel patterns of
using local bus routes. Customer service and outreach staff continue working
on educational efforts to engage these communities and encourage Link usage
as a faster travel option." --
July 2012 draft of Before and After Study, Table 5-1.

Based
on ridership results posted through March 2015, and Sound Transit's own
revised targets, the 37,800 daily boardings number is not
likely to be ever achieved as an all-year average before track extensions
and additional stations open in 2016, a point when new promises of future
ridership achievement come into play. What's intriguing now is whether
Sound Transit will meet the expanded ridership targets for 2016 and beyond
that have been set before actual experience at the three new stations is
visible. Just as in the run up to the limited network that opened in
2009, the agency expresses high confidence, saying that ridership will rise
rapidly. The official forecast for daily ridership in 2016 is 48,500,
and 56,600 in 2017.

The
next light rail ridership that really matters is 2017, which will be the first
full year with the next three added stations. The Sound Transit Board of
Directors political strategy illustrated in previous years
and now visibly emerging as of June 2015 is to hold a system expansion tax vote in the 2016 Presidential election
year before those results are known.

Sound Transit's Central Link Light
Rail between downtown Seattle and Sea-Tac Airport achieved its
highest
ridership ever on February 5, 2014, a regional celebration day with the
downtown parade for the Seahawks Super Bowl victory. Estimated ridership was
71,500 that day. Before that great day, the highest
ridership had been on the occasion of Paul McCartney’s concert at Safeco field on
July 19, 2013, attracting 42,000 boardings.Ball games and other events in
the Century Link and Safeco stadiums near Stadium Station are proving to be an
important source of ridership on light rail. PITF calculates that from May
through September 2012, sporting events brought in an additional 71,000 riders
per month.

Higher ridership means
more standing on the light rail trains instead of sitting, as shown on the front cover
of Sound Transit's 2011 annual report at right. Meeting the ridership forecast
would require that even more passengers must stand instead of sit for part of
their trip. This condition has been expected by agency planning, but
perhaps not so much by Seattle transit riders. Crowded trains may discourage
ridership by those who have options. While light rail cars can be packed safely
by design with up to 200 riders, PITF has observed the reluctance of passengers
on a platform to board after about 150 folks have stepped into a rail car.
Sound Transit light rail trains from downtown southward are currently limited to two cars by the track
capacity where trains reverse direction at the north end of the Downtown
Transit Tunnel.

Trains of up to four cars will operate beginning in 2016.

Short-term ridership
forecasting at Sound Transit is now improving year by year. Since 2012 annual
ridership targets have been exceeded by reported results. But back In 2010 the actual ridership of
7 million all year was more than one million below the forecast of 8.1 million.
The average weekday ridership for all of 2010 was 21,026, which was 21% below
the short-run forecast. The 2010 forecast was made in fall 2009, a year after
the beginning of the recession in 2008 that was
blamed by Sound Transit for the ridership being below the short-run forecast in
2010.

Authorities plan for the
majority of light rail riders to be people commuting to work, and thus there is
a focus by Sound Transit and Federal Transit Administration on weekday ridership
on non-holidays. The blue line on the next chart below shows non-holiday weekday
ridership day by day on Central Link light rail July 2009 through March 2015. The red
line on the chart shows a 15 day moving average -- amounting to three weeks --
that smoothes out the daily fluctuations and allows detection of up or down
fluctuations in the weekday ridership. The overall ridership trend is up, with seasonal
variation, high in summer, lower in winter. This pattern of seasonal
oscillation has been consistent for all the years that light rail has been open
in Seattle, caused by summer tourism, sports events, and weather. The all-year
goal of 37,800 per day was routinely exceeded in the summer of 2014, and will
undoubtedly be exceeded again in summer 2015. According to Sound Transit,
the ridership will be oscillating around a median way above the orange line in
2017 when three new stations are in operation. This claim will be
verifiable when 2017 arrives.

For 2015 the expected weekday average
for the entire year was set in the approved budget as 35,300 shown as the level
of the green line on the above weekday chart toward the far right.
Beginning in the summer of 2012, light rail began breaking 35,000 riders on
weekdays where there was an event at one of the
SODO stadiums. In the summer of 2013, breaking 35,000 was no longer unusual,
and thanks to a former Beatle, light rail got
to over 40,000 riders in a single day for the first time on July 19, 2013. Since
then, thanks to the Seahawks, the capacity of
the present system was challenged with 71,500 riders
on February 5, 2014.

PITF is encouraged
that Sound Transit has now set strongly growing ridership as an important objective for the region's significant light
rail investment made to date.

Sound Transit light rail line extensions
planned to open in 2016 serve two stations
northward to Husky Stadium at University of Washington, and one southward to South 200th in SeaTac.
Incredibly, the agency forecasts these three new stations will eventually expand system
ridership by over 74,000 riders per weekday. These claims are based on station boarding
forecasts equivalent to ridership at subway stops in New York City. Sound Transit's present day
ridership experience compared to earlier pre-opening forecasts does not bode
well for this forecast.

Public Interest
Transportation Forum thanks Sound Transit for its willingness to share data
with us, and thus document a unique record of day-by-day development of light
rail ridership in a world class city. All data sheets from Sound Transit are
posted at the bottom of this page. The route of Seattle's Central Link light
rail from downtown to the main regional commercial airport is
shown here on a map that
also depicts with dotted lines the forthcoming extensions both to the north and
the south.
Some
history of how this line was developed is here on Seattle Transit Blog.

This
frequently updated summary page on Seattle light rail ridership was
referenced in a March 3, 2011 Seattle Times article by journalist Mike
Lindblom,
"Sound Transit ridership falls short of goals."
Expressing the attitude of many rail boosters, Sound Transit Board member
Dave Enslow shrugged off below-forecast ridership in this article: "He
emphasized the rail lines are a 100-year investment." PITF
counters that the
interurban
regional rail system Seattle had 100 years ago was terminated well before
it had seen a century of operation.

Below is
additional detail prepared over the past few years for diving deeper into Seattle light rail ridership:

In
considering the weekday ridership, note that rail ridership on a new line in
any U.S. city typically rises within 18 months to its ultimate level until more
stations are opened or the line is extended.
William
Millar, former head of the American Public Transportation Association, noted this
pattern in an interview in 2009, reported by the P-I. Tacoma Link, open
since 2003, illustrates this reaching of a plateau in a chart below. As noted earlier, the 2020 forecast -- ultimate ridership -- for the
Airport to Downtown segment in Seattle -- considered by itself separately from
future extensions -- was 45,000 average daily boardings per weekday. Sound Transit now hopes
for 35,300 in 2015, the last full year in which ridership on the Airport to
Westlake Center line is forecast separately.

Because weekend
ridership has turned out to be important for Seattle's light rail, the next
ridership chart provided below shows all days. The first, second, third,
fourth, and fifth years of light rail operation are displayed on the same time axis,
with the July 20 revenue service start-up anniversary beginning each year. The
fainter daily numbers jump up and down considerably, but to indicate what's
happening more clearly, the 14 day moving averages of daily ridership – on all
days including the important weekends – are shown in thicker lines The first
year, July 2009 to July 2010 is in green. The second year, July 2010 to
July 2011 is in red. The third year, July 2011 to July 2012 is in
blue. The fourth year, July 2012 to July 2013 is orange.The fifth year is the purple line beginning
July 2013 through July 2014.

The sixth year is the top pink line
starting July 2014 and continuing, eventually, to July 2015.

As the chart
illustrates, ridership in the second full year of Seattle's light rail service
(in red) did not grow as strongly as in the first year (in green). The blue
line of the third year tracked pretty much continuously just above the red line
of the second year. The orange line of the fourth year started to trend
downward after the SeaFair weekend 2012 summer peak moving average reached
about 30,000 per day., although the combination of Seahawks and Husky football
at Century Link Field near Stadium Station provided a visible surge
during September 2012.Fall 2012 showed upward bumps because of the
Seahawks despite the downward trend. Ridership bottomed out as 2013 began, and
a steady upward ridership trend began that turned into a power surge in the
mid-May to mid-June period when the Mariners still had hope of a winning
season.Growth continued moderately
after that, peaking about the time of SeaFair weekend, and then the fall
decline began, shown with the purple line on the left hand upper side of the
chart below.The winning Seahawks and the
high price of parking provided more light rail ridership in the last
quarter of 2013 than ever before seen in that season. Calendar year 2014
from February through June in dark blue showed the strongest growth trend yet. The one
day Seahawks celebration surge on February 5th bumped up the 14 day moving
average visibly for -- no surprise -- 14 days. The usual autumn through
winter dip in ridership exhibited for the fifth year in a row starting in
September 2014.

As
shown below, in winter the ridership averages have occasionally bumped into or
even crossed below the
low winter levels of previous years. For the first time, this did not happen at
all in the winter of
2013-14.

More simple versions of
this chart focusing on the month-to-month change in weekday, Saturday, and
Sunday/holiday ridership have been created and
posted
by Seattle Transit Blog from the data posted in the archive at the bottom
of this page.

The alignment and
stations of Seattle light rail line this year are the same as last year, with
the terminus points at Westlake Center in downtown and the Sea-Tac Airport south
of the city limits, and eleven stations in between. In February 2010, King
County Metro reduced bus services that ran parallel to light rail in the same
corridor and deployed more bus trips to serve light rail stations. In 2011-12,
King County Metro has had enough funding to maintain bus service to and from
light rail stations and thus support Sound Transit's goal of increasing
ridership.

Starting in June 2015, King County Metro service to and
from the vicinity of Sound Transit rail stations has been expanded, and this
should boost ridership on the trains going forward.

PITF
has received some questions about seasonality of transit ridership. One
question has been, does the annual drop in light rail ridership beginning mid-summer
and lasting through
Thanksgiving and beyond follow a usual pattern of transit
seasonality? The answer is no, based on the observation that monthly
ridership on Metro bus from 2002 onward has always been greater in October
than July.The falling ridership pattern on Link Light Rail exhibited after August is more akin to the ridership pattern on the
Seattle Monorail, the Seattle Lake Union streetcar or the former Seattle
waterfront streetcar all of which demonstrate peaks of ridership in the
summer compared to the rest of the year.

As reported in the
Before and After Study required by the FTA, "Typically the region sees the
highest transit ridership in the fall months when universities and colleges
are in session, so ridership on Central Link has shown a different seasonal
effect than the rest of the transit services in the region." However, PITF expects that this
seasonal pattern will change once the station on the University of Washington
campus opens in the first half of 2016.

The
Mariners, the Sounders, the Seahawks, University of Washington, Sound Transit, and
Port of Seattle all promote light rail use for attending baseball, soccer, and
football games.
Mariners
baseball has been a big contributor to Central Link
light rail ridership of all the SODO stadium sports. The photo shows a 2010
scene on a Link rail car before the opening day game.

Weekday baseball games with
popular opponents are the source of some of the spikes seen on the all-days
ridership chart above. Seattle Seahawks home games also bring a surge of
light rail ridership on Sundays..

In a special study, PITF compared light rail ridership
on game event days vs
non-event days during the four months of June through September, 2012. Light rail weekdays without games average 26,843, while weekdays with games
average 30,500 -- higher by 3,658, a gain of 14%. Spread across all weekdays,
the Stadium boardings boost up the daily average by about 1,900. On
weekends and the two holidays July 4th and Labor Day, the difference is more
dramatic. The weekend/holiday average ridership on days without events
came in at 19,675. On weekend event days, including the SeaFair weekend,
the average was 24,650, higher by 4,975 per day, or 25% above non-event weekend
days.

One
way of understanding
the importance of weekend game day attendance to light rail ridership is to
look at the relationship between the average weekday ridership and total annual
ridership, a number called the annualization factor. The annualization factor
reflects the fact that forecasts involve calculations that come up with daily
ridership, and that daily ridership cannot sensibly be multiplied by 365 days
per year to get annual ridership. This is because not as many people use
transit on weekend and holidays as use it on normal work days. In its forecasting
work, Sound Transit expected this annualization factor to be 304. Before seeing
the Link Light Rail experience, the agency forecast 26,600 average weekday
ridership in 2010 and multiplied by 304 to reach the annual forecast of 8.1
million. Instead, Sound Transit experienced 7 million annual riders with
a weekday average ridership of 21,000. You have to multiply 21,000 by 333 to
get a 7 million annual number. This means that Sound Transit light rail
has a greater reliance on weekend riders for making its year over year gains than was expected
earlier.

Furthermore, as noted in
the Before and After Study, "Ridership
on Central Link experiences a seasonal pattern that peaks during the summer
months when more sports events and community events are hosted in downtown
Seattle, and the tourist and cruise ship season draws more riders between
downtown and the airport. "

One irony arises from
the historical fact that the formerly forecast daily average of 45,000 per day
was based on a system plan that did not even include Stadium Station and its
game day riders. Stadium Station was at first to be deferred until after
construction of the Initial Segment was completed in 2009, but that decision
was reconsidered in 2005 and station put back into the construction plans for
opening in 2009.

For the 2011 revised
forecast, Sound Transit had 8.3 million annual riders equivalent to 25,000 per
weekday average. The ratio implies an annualization factor of 332, which
means the agency is learning from and embracing its real world ridership
experience. The 2012 budget forecast for Seattle light rail is 8.4 million
annual riders equivalent to 25,455 per weekday average, revealing an
annualization factor of 330, coming down a bit but still way above 304 because
weekend ridership is so important. The 2013 budget forecast for Seattle light
rail is 9.2 million annual riders equivalent to 27,900 weekday average,
indicating the annualization factor being held at 330. The actual
annualization factor revealed in 2012 is 335, which indicates Sound Transit
sandbagged its 2013 forecast to be below what the actual was likely to be,
given that the weekday forecast is accurate. In fact, 2013 ridership came in at
9,681,432, five percent above the forecast of 9.2 million.

It's
been pointed out to PITF that back in 1996 when Sound Transit was winning its
initial voter approval for taxing authority, the agency forecast that Seattle
light rail by 2006 would have 105,000 riders per day. Of course, as of 2014,
citizens of the region know that the agency is now planning to take until
about 2021 to complete and open the system from NE 45th to S 200th that is
supposed to carry that many people. That's a 15 year delay.

The
pie chart shown next
provides a comparison of Link Light Rail ridership for a strong recent month,
July 2012 with the ridership for other modes in the same month. King County
Metro clearly dominates the transit patronage picture. The comparison is
somewhat unfair, because light rail and other rail services run on a single line,
while the Metro Bus network covers all of urbanized King County. Central Link
can be considered a single line in the King County Metro service territory.

On the other hand, the
$2.5 billion Sound Transit capital expenditure over a decade to construct and
buy vehicles and equipment for the light rail line has vastly exceeded the
approximately $100 million per year capital expenditure for Metro Bus equipment
and facilities over a comparable time period.

The next chart shows
how monthly light rail ridership in Seattle evolved in its first months of life
compared to ridership on the Tacoma Link streetcar and the South Lake Union
streetcar.

As one can see, Central
Link light rail carries far more people than the streetcar lines shown, and is
also showing very wide variations from month to month. The summer tourist bump
is somewhat visible on the graph line for the Seattle streetcar of the present
day (green line to the right), as well as very visible on the former waterfront
trolley car, now discontinued (green line to the left).

The
ridership forecast
made by Sound Transit ten years ago for this line as a justification for
Federal funding was made station by station. The 21,400 total daily
passengers making up the ridership gap below forecast as of last summer are
shown for each station in the next chart. The Airport Station is not
included because its ridership is already above the 2020 forecast by about
2,000 per day!

The stations from
Tukwila to Beacon Hill can be considered the commute shed for Seattle's light
rail, and the daily rider boarding shortage shown below for this series of
stations comes to 9,900 per day. The resulting 21,400 daily ridership gap
below the 2020 forecast of 45,000 is by simple arithmetic not being made up
from the 1,900 daily weekday average ridership gained in summer from Stadium
Station plus the 2,000 unexpected daily boardings at the Airport.

As another
source of insight, consider pre-Link weekday average boarding counts for
three King County Metro lines covering part of the same or parallel
corridors: Route 48: 13,800, Route 7: 11,000, Route 194: 4,800. Link
daily ridership beats any one bus line, but of course a comparison should be
based on changes in ridership across the entire portion of the network as
reconfigured after the train line opens, for the following reason:

General transit operating
philosophy in bus-rail combined systems is to feed as many bus lines as
practical to rail stations in order to deliver bus passengers to what is
expected to be a faster, higher capacity mode. Some one-seat bus rides become
bus and rail journeys with a transfer during the trip.

Depending on the routing
and frequency of feeder buses, as well as the route, frequency, and capacity
of the train, a transit journey after the advent of rail may or may not be
faster and more comfortable for a particular customer than the all-bus
predecessor. It is the aggregated response of the entire market to the
changes brought by a new rail line that makes for success or failure of a
project like Link. This effect can be assessed through looking at
ridership trends for bus plus rail in the entire corridor that light rail
serves.

PITF's overall
estimate of light rail riders as of Fall 2010 who were former bus riders was
approximately 60% in the Airport market and the Rainier Valley market served
by Link, based on raw ridership data collected by Metro and Sound Transit in
Fall 2008 and Fall 2010. The drop in bus ridership divided by rise in rail
ridership (from zero) came out to be 55% for routes to SeaTac Airport and 67%
for Rainier Valley to downtown. This calculation suggests that 55
to 67 percent of rail riders are former bus riders.

As required by the Federal Transit Administration, Sound Transit has conducted a "before and after
study" of Link light rail comparing Fall 2008 with Fall 2011.
This report notes, "After Central Link was implemented, a similar level of bus
service hours remained in the project corridor. Resources from truncated or
eliminated routes were generally reinvested in the corridor, resulting in a
similar amount of service hours....Transit commuting in the project
corridor increased by about 2,000 daily trips between fall 2008 and fall 2011,
in spite of an economic recession that significantly depressed employment
during this period."

King County Metro did its own study in the fall of 2010,
and from this study the drop in bus ridership on parallel Metro bus routes
that occurred simultaneously with the ramp up of rail ridership can be
extracted.

This effect was not studied in the Before and After Study,
even though sufficient data was collected to assess this point of interest.

Note:
Sound Transit states that the daily readings charted on this page are estimates
and subject to revision.

Through field
observations, PITF estimates that Sound Transit is using photoelectric
"beam" passenger sensors above the eight doors on twenty of the first
62 rail cars to be put into service and then extrapolates to all the cars on
all runs during a service day. This way of counting passenger rail boardings is
standard in the U.S. transit industry. Following further revisions, numbers
similar to the above will be Sound Transit's official report on passengers
served provided to the public and U.S. Government. Sound Transit's
quarterly ridership reports to the public are posted
here.

Sound
Transit also compiles
boarding and exiting counts of customers at the various light rail
stations.

Ridership is highly
seasonal. Using the data for
Summer 2012 and Fall-Winter 2012-13, the drop from the light rail summer
ridership high can be observed at the station level. The largest drops
occur at both ends of the line, Westlake Center and the Airport, and at Stadium
Station. Ridership actually rose a bit at Beacon Hill and Mount Baker, probably
because of student ridership.

When all the stations
are in view and clustered into geographic groupings, as below, the seasonality
of ridership is evident, although the patronage at the five residential
neighborhood stations in Seattle between and including Beacon Hill to Rainier
Beach shows no seasonality and ongoing growth.

Photo of the automated passenger counting electronic eye on Link rail
cars number 101 to 110, about a third of the first cars put in service. As of
October, 2010 cars numbered 111 to 135 do not have these counters
installed. PITF estimates that cars numbered 136 through 145 of the next
27 cars have counters installed, but observed cars 146 and above do not. Total
boarding counts are extrapolated from numbers recorded on the cars where the
counters exist.